Associated PressIranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will have dinner with Quaker and Mennonite leaders and others when he is in New York to address the United Nations next week.

A group of U.S. religious leaders has invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to dinner Sept. 25 during his visit to the United Nations. Representatives from The Mennonite Central Committee, the World Council of Churches and the American Friends Service Committee will meet with the Iranian president, who has made it his stated goal to eliminate Israel and has often denied the Holocaust..

Leaders of the pacifist churches said they are being criticized for doing what Jesus did.

"Jesus ate with lepers and with tax collectors, and in the United States right now, Iran would be in that category," Arli Klassen, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, an outreach arm for Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in the United States and Canada, told the Religion News Service.

"The criticisms levied at Jesus were that he ate with ... people of ill repute, and we're getting similar criticisms."

The Anti-Defamation League was among those critical of the plans. "Ahmadinejad represents a rejection of everything these religious groups stand for," Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told RNS. "Their breaking bread with President Ahmadinejad is a perversion of the search for peace and an appalling betrayal of religious values."

But Jewish groups were not the only ones upset. Mark Tooley, executive director of United Methodist Action, said, "these confused prelates will undoubtedly minimize, if not ignore, the evils of the Iranian police state theocracy that brutalizes all who do not share its particular brand of Shiite Islam.

"They are more worried about what the U.S. might do to Iran than what Iran's deranged president, filled with apocalyptic dreams of destroying the U.S. and Israel, might do to the world."